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Startup Agility 135

be gained while chasing customers and revenue, wise founders view
learning as a primary objective of their startup launch. They are insa-
tiable students of successes and failures, large and small. They dig
for cause-and-effect relationships and erase uncertainty wherever
possible. This mindset of discovery ensures that positive results are
evaluated and put in perspective, and that the inevitable mistakes and
misadventures bring value to the venture as well. Learning cannot be
separated from your startup’s performance because it drives startup
performance.

Three practices will help you avoid a certainty-driven approach
and, instead, launch your venture as a flexible process of discovery.
The first is rapid, healthy iteration, a process that will drive and enrich
your new venture learning curve. The second is to ensure that your
cycles of iteration are occurring at multiple levels, beyond simply
cranking out new product features. And the third is to capture relevant
lessons in a balanced and holistic way, utilizing the four-quadrant
model for new venture success.

HEALTHY ITERATION DRIVES LEARNING

Eric Ries, a software engineer and entrepreneur who launched his
Lessons Learned blog in 2008 and quickly became a leading champion
of “lean startup” principles for dealing with the pervasive uncertainty
faced by new ventures, often opens his startup workshops with a pair
of absurd videos.4 The first features a confident Ali G (one of come-
dian Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional alter egos) pitching a product
idea called the “Ice Cream Glove” to investors, including Donald
Trump and a series of unwitting venture capital pros. The Ice Cream
Glove is a rubber glove that Ali G claims will take the world by
storm, because it allows people to eat ice cream cones without getting
ice cream on their hands. Later in the video, he unveils his “hover-
board,” basically a skateboard without wheels, which he hopes will
be converted, thanks to venture capital funding, into a flying plat-
form. These ideas are so comical that the most priceless aspects of
the footage are Ali G’s sincerity in pitching his concepts and the
dumbfounded looks on his listeners’ faces.

American Management Association • www.amanet.org